Strategic Dynamics (About my company)

JonIngham.com (About me!)

The Social Organization website (About Social Capital / my second book)

Saturday, 7 November 2009

So after having considered the context and the technology, Nigel Paine (previously Head of Learning at the BBC and provider of a case study for my HCM book) took us through his thoughts on trends in learning and development.

Firstly, this is important – see these stats on the role of training and development within employer branding:

Secondly, it’s changing:

From courses to environments

From knowledge delivered to knowledge shared

From control to free flow

From individuals to communities

From skills to values and culture.

Martin Bean, Vice Chairman at the Open University talks about the following four aspects of learning environments which will need to change to reflect the future:

We need to encourage people to use what’s available free on the web, and to generate their own user driven content.

The Good Enough revolution

Other things include the good enough revolution – realising that things (like this post! – or a Lego brick) don’t need to be perfect if it allows us to achieve velocity.

Nigel’s example was Skype which isn’t perfect but is growing faster than any other telecoms firm is carried 10% of the world’s telecoms traffic last year.

From shaping to framing

We need to move from shaping learning solutions to framing the learning proposition. Not telling the company or learners what to do, but arguing the case for where learning fits in.

It’s about leading the debate, defining reality.

Changing attitudes

One of the questions for the panel that Nigel was on and I was chairing was about increasing the penetration rate of e-learning usage. After talking about infrastructure challenges, I asked all panel members about dealing with attitudinal challenges too (referring back to a question I’d had about intranet usage). Nigel made these three suggestions:

Ensure there is a clear architecture vs inconsistency in applications

Bring useful information to the top (when he started at the BBC their intranet pages were all about departments’ mission and values etc. They changed this to focus on what people needed to do etc)

Ensure all information is on, and only on, the intranet – ensuring some excitement (re breaking news etc).